A Tragic Flaw in Our Precious Constitution
When my son was a teenager he had an answer for everything. It went like this: "So it goes." You could ask how school was: "so it goes." You could ask him if he took out the trash for his mother: "so it goes." You could ask him what the meaning of life was: "so it goes." Now at the time I just checked it off to the brain farts that are all too common amongst teenagers and people my age, or an often times successful attempt just to piss me off. I had no idea he was meditating on an insight of one of the most insightful individuals to live in this or any other time. It is just as well, if I had known it was Kurt Vonnegut I might have been biased against picking up one of his books years later about the Dresden bombing and would have had poorer life because of it.
So anyway, I come across a wonderfully insightful quote of Mister Vonnegut's and would like to remind you of it at this time in the election cycle: "There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nutcases want to be president."
This is one of those things that is so obviously true that it would never occur to you to express it, let alone consider its ramifications if you lived to be a hundred and ten. I can't think of a single normal person that wants to be president. That's because normal people don't want to be president. Now, you can be perfectly normal one day, and the next day you can want to be president, and the act of wanting it turns you into a nutcase.
What is ironic here is our strong desire to ascribe normality to the person we vote for, and more importantly, to ascribe a flaw in the normality of those we don't. The most common qualification for gaining someone's vote is that they be someone you could imagine having a beer with down at the local tavern. Given the number of nutcases at Al's Place over on Main Street the expression does no harm at all to Kurt's insight.
I have always wondered what teetotalers think of this presidential criteria, but I have never been one to give much credence to whatever that might be. Though I would be interested as to what the equivalent might be, given that unlike the nutcase moron in the office today, I am a curious individual.
Personally I have always had a problem with the notion of normality. It has always struck me as rather a presumptuous proposition. But I am a strong believer that everything that has a certain amount of common currency must have a source where its truth is obvious. When it comes to the concept of normality, I have never stumbled upon a convincing explanation of its currency, but people who want to be president certainly provide a convincing proof of the existence of its opposite, and given that every ying has a yang, I take that as proof of the existence of normality that must reside somewhere in this vast universe. Maybe under the left nut of God, should it have a left nut, and given the western conception of a deity that takes in all things it most certainly does.
So normality that resides somewhere under the left nut of the western deity is well out of harm's way from all those nutcases that want to be president. It is at the very least a reassuring thought. So it goes.
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